What writing of Joan Didion, who died today, did you enjoy?

I believe I’ve only read The Year of Magical Thinking which was great. I also saw Vanessa Redgrave perform in a one woman play based on that book.

I enjoyed Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her novel Play It as It Lays. I’ve had others of her works (particularly her essay collections, including The White Album) on my to-read list for a while now and I hate that her death is motivating me to read some of these, but that’s how it goes. I’m looking forward to reading more about her.

I was all set to direct a friend in The Year of Magical Thinking when life events intervened, and we couldn’t do it.

She wrote an interesting review of Manhattan. I don’t agree with all of it, but I appreciate her point of view.

I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem in my California History class at UC Santa Barbara in 1975, it was an eye opener for this 20 yr old. And I read The White Album a few years later.

Both were quite good at exposing me to a differnt viewpoint, although I would place Didion as a southern California rather than an observer of the whole state.

I’ve read only The Year of Magical Thinking, which I read shortly after my husband’s death earlier this year. It was absolutely the right thing for me at the time. Joan Didion’s unsparing narrative of her first year as a widow was alarming, comforting, scary, and ultimately wise. “In the end you have to go with the change” stays with me. Still working on going with the change, knowing millions before me have done it.

She and her husband co-wrote the script for The Panic in Needle Park, starring a young Al Pacino, a movie that is hard to watch but that I consider brilliant. I’ve seen it four times and will watch it once more before I send it back to Netflix to be de-listed into oblivion.

If there is such a thing as peace after death, if there is anything at all, I wish it for Joan Didion.